The Academic Word List (AWL) is a list of 570 word families (head words) which covers 3107 types (individual word forms including the headwords and their inflectional and derivative family members) and is grouped into 10 sublists that are developed by using a 3.5 million-word written academic corpus covering four discipline areas of arts, commerce, law and science (Coxhead, 2011, p. 355). Data from Brown Corpus show that a reader needs to know another 3000 words to raise the coverage of texts from 79.7% (the first 2000 words from GSL) to 88.6% (Nation, 2001, p. 15). The AWL is ground-breaking in that upon mastering the GSL words, university students can expect to reach comparable text coverage and know about 90% of the running words they will meet in any academic text if they embed another 570 academic words into their lexical repertoire. A number of studies have shown that the coverage of AWL words in academic texts is consistently around 10% in both multi-disciplinary corpus and discipline-specific corpus (Coxhead, 2011). They make it possible for EAP learners to enhance vocabulary recognition and reading abilities notably “for a relatively modest learning investment” (Cobb, n.d.).